OK, since most of you guys are pretty good with computers as well as transistors I thought I'd ask here:
I am *trying* to get a second HDD working in win98. It is a 2GB disk but hey I got it for free :mrgreen: anyway, I entered all the necessary data in the BIOS, and the BIOS finds the disk, yada yada yada and then comes Windows :evil: it sees the disk in the hardware profile, but doesn't assign it a drive letter...
How do I get Windows to give the darn drive a letter and use it? I've tried everything I can think of... :roll:
Did you set the jumpers on the drive as a slave? Did you format the drive? FDISK on the command line should recognize it and allow you to set up the drive.
did you try going through the Add New Hardware Wizard.. does 98 have that ?
If winblows sees the drive in the hardware profile then the hardware side of things are fine. Have you tried to format the drive ? The drive might have a file system that Win98 can't read.
Andrew
I depends on how the hard drive was formatted. If it's FAT32, then theoritically, it should work with your computer, if it is set up as FAT32.
Then, there's the standard stuff - jumper settings, BIOS settings, etc. It sounds like you already checked everything out on that side of things. So Windows sees it as a hard drive, but it must not know what to do with it... I would probably reformat the hard drive, if it were me. But first, are you sure that the hard drive is functional? Maybe Windows can't read it because it isn't functioning?!
You need to partition the drive before you can assign a drive letter. windows 9.x uses the fdisk utility to partition physical drives into logical volumes. After you partition the drive you must format it. here are instructions:
How to Repartition and Format a Slave Hard Disk
How to Repartition a Slave Hard Disk
If you want to add a second hard disk (slave drive) to your computer, you need to make sure that the jumpers on both the master (original) and slave (new drive) are set according to the manufacturer's instructions first so that your computer can detect the hard disks. Verify that your hardware is installed correctly, and then follow these steps:
1. Click Start, point to Run, and then type command (Note that the cmd command only works on Windows 2000-based computers).
2. At a command prompt, type fdisk, and then press ENTER. The following menu is displayed:
1. Create DOS partition or Logical DOS Drive
2. Set active partition
3. Delete partition or Logical DOS Drive
4. Display partition information
5. Change current fixed disk drive
Note that menu option 5 is available only if you have two physical hard disks on your computer.
3. Press 5, and then press ENTER. When you do this, the selection changes from the physical disk 1 (master) to the physical disk 2 (slave).
4. Press 1 to select the Create DOS partition or Logical DOS Drive menu option, press ENTER, press 2 to select the Create Extended DOS Partition menu option, and then press ENTER. When you make your slave drive an extended MS-DOS partition, your drive letters does not change. For example, if the first drive contains partition C and partition D, your slave drive becomes D unless you set the slave drive as an extended partition. If you skip this step and just create another primary MS-DOS partition for the slave drive, the new drive becomes drive D and what used to be drive D, changes to drive E.
5. You can partition the slave drive to make other logical drives just as you did with the original master drive. If your computer cannot detect the new drive, you may need to add the following line to your Config.sys file, where drive is a letter that is greater than the last drive letter on the computer (including the CD-ROM drive):
lastdrive=drive
6. After you finish using the Fdisk tool, format the new partitions so that you can use them. After you press ESC to quit the Fdisk tool, restart your computer to start Windows.
How to Format a Slave Hard Disk
To format your new partition or partitions, use one of the following methods, depending on your file system. For a FAT16 file system:
1. Double-click My Computer, right-click the partition that you just created, click Format, click Full, and then click Start.
2. After the format procedure is complete, click OK to close the dialog box.
For a FAT32 file system:
1. Click Start, point to Programs, point to Accessories, point to System Tools, click Drive Converter (FAT32), and then click Next.
2. In the Drives box, click the drive that you want to convert to the FAT32 file system.
3. Click Next, and then click OK.
4. Click Next, click Next, and then click Next again.
5. When the conversion procedure is finished, click Finish.
Thanks for the replies.... I don't know what it was formatted to... I have my primary master disk which is C D and E, and then the primary slave which doesn't have a drive letter. I'll try jplaudio's method and report back. Thanks a lot! :D
I have my primary master disk in FAT16... could I use the FAT32 converter to turn that into a FAT32 drive? And would my DOS porgrams still run off that? I have lots of old DOS games :mrgreen:
I have some DOS programs that run fine on FAT32.
If you go into add/remove programs in the control panel there is a tab for startup disk. Make one and boot your system using it. Then run fdisk at the command prompt and follow the instructions there to delete the old partition (if there is one) and make a new one. If fdisk won't recognise the drive then it's fried.
I used fdisk... IT WORKS! 2 GB extra! that's good on a shitty old machine like mine :mrgreen:
Thanks for the help everyone :)